Empower Your Full-stack Web Development with Strapi, Next.js, and Material-UI

Are you a web developer looking to create modern, full-featured web applications with ease? Look no further, as we'll introduce you to a powerful trio of tools in this tutorial: Strapi, Next.js, and Material-UI. In today's fast-paced web development landscape, harnessing the power of these frameworks and libraries will elevate your productivity and enable you to create professional-grade applications.

This tutorial will walk you through the process of creating a web application that leverages the power of Strapi as a headless CMS, Next.js for server-rendered React applications, and Material-UI for responsive, polished UI components. We'll build a simple blog application, focusing on the basics of setting up each tool and integrating them to create a functional and visually appealing website.

What You’ll Need

Before diving into this tutorial, ensure that you have the following tools installed on your development machine:

• Node.js (v12 or higher)
• Yarn (or npm, if you prefer)
• Git (optional, but recommended)

Setting Up Strapi

Strapi is an open-source, headless Content Management System (CMS) that allows developers to manage content and data for any device or platform. It's easily customizable, extensible, and provides a user-friendly admin panel that makes managing content a breeze.

To initialize a new Strapi project, open your terminal and enter the following command:

yarn create strapi-app my-strapi-app --quickstart

Replace "my-strapi-app" with your desired project name. The --quickstart flag will set up a SQLite database by default, but you can choose a different database if you prefer.

Once the installation is complete, navigate to the Strapi dashboard by opening your browser and visiting http://localhost:1337/admin. Sign up and log in to your Strapi admin panel.

Create a new "Article" content type with the following fields:

• Title (Text)
• Content (Rich Text)
• Author (Relation, User)

Save and restart your Strapi server. Next, add some sample articles using the Strapi admin panel. Remember to make sure that the "find" and "findOne" permissions are enabled for the "Article" content type under "Settings" > "Roles" > "Public".

Setting Up Next.js

Next.js is a powerful React framework that allows developers to create server-rendered and static web applications with ease. It provides automatic code-splitting, built-in CSS and Sass support, and a growing ecosystem of plugins and tools.

To create a new Next.js project, open a new terminal window and run the following command:

yarn create next-app my-next-app

Replace "my-next-app" with your desired project name. Once the installation is complete, navigate to the project directory using cd my-next-app and start the development server with yarn dev.

Now, let's install the necessary dependencies for this tutorial. Open a new terminal window in the Next.js project directory and run the following command:

yarn add @material-ui/core @emotion/react @emotion/styled axios

Integrating Material-UI

Material-UI is a popular React UI framework that provides a robust set of components for building responsive and beautiful web applications. We'll utilize Material-UI to style our Next.js application, giving it a professional touch.

Open your Next.js project in your favorite code editor, then import the Material-UI CSS into your "pages/_app.js" file as shown below:

import React from 'react';
import '../styles/globals.css';
import { CssBaseline } from '@material-ui/core';

function MyApp({ Component, pageProps }) {
  return (
    <>
      
      
    
  );
}

export default MyApp;

Now, you can use Material-UI components throughout your application by importing and using them in your React components. Your web application's UI will be both responsive and polished.

Fetching and Displaying Articles

To fetch and display articles from our Strapi CMS, let's start by importing Axios in our "pages/index.js" and modifying the "getServerSideProps()" function to retrieve articles during server-side rendering:

import axios from 'axios';

export async function getServerSideProps() {
  const res = await axios.get('http://localhost:1337/articles');
  const articles = res.data;

  return {
    props: {
      articles
    }
  };
}

Next, update the "Home" component in "pages/index.js" to display the fetched articles using Material-UI components:

import React from 'react';
import { Container, Grid, Typography, Card, CardContent } from '@material-ui/core';

export default function Home({ articles }) {
  return (
    
      
        Latest Articles
      
      
        {articles.map((article) => (
          
            
              
                
                  {article.title}
                
                {article.content}
              
            
          
        ))}
      
    
  );
}

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we've built a simple blog application using Strapi, Next.js, and Material-UI. This powerful trio of tools can empower your full-stack web development process and help you create modern, responsive, and polished web applications with ease. The principles introduced here are just the tip of the iceberg; we encourage you to dive deeper into each tool's documentation and explore the full range of features and integrations available.